The most successful businesses are those with confidence in their ability to store, access and use data effectively. Rather than focusing on the nuts and bolts of storage, this view point looks at the data it holds and more importantly, what can be done with it.

This review looks at why small businesses need to stop being complacent about their networks and at what they can do to maintain their competitive edge as they follow the big boys down the route of increasing collaboration and other bandwidth-hungry applications likely to impact on network performance and availability.

The project to develop the incredibly high speeds is one of six deals being undertaken by the EU and Japan, which will be funded with €18m to research areas that include cyber security, network capacity, storage, high density data traffic and energy efficiency.

The European Commission (EC) said that given the huge amounts of data that networks will generate in the future, there is a ‘pressing need’ to create more efficient networks that can handle vast amounts of data. To illustrate this, the EC said currently 1.7 million billion bytes of data is sent per minute and these traffic volumes are expected to grow 12-fold by 2018.

EC digital vice president Neelie Kroes said: "Our future internet should know no barriers, least of all barriers created because we did not prepare for the data revolution.”

The project involved on the 100Gbps networks is called Strauss. More insight is given on the EU and Japanese plans to develop the technology on the Strauss website.

Other projects include, Miweba, which is looking at making better use of existing radio frequencies in order to boost ultra-high speed and mobile connections. Necoma is looking at new ways to enhance personal data security in sensitive environments while GreenICN is looking at the reliability of networks in post-disaster situations when network performance is vital.